Genre and change in the Corpus of History English Texts 1

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the Corpus of History English Texts, one of the component parts of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (Moskowich and Crespo 2012), looking in particular at the communicative formats that it contains. Among the defining characteristics of the Coruña Corpus are that it is diachronic in nature, and that it can be considered either as a single-or multi-genre corpus, according to the theoretical tenets adopted (Kytö 2010; McEnery and Hardie 2013). The corpus has been designed as a tool for the study of language change in English scientific writing in general, and more specifically in the different scientific disciplines which have been sampled in each subcorpus. All the texts compiled were published between 1700 and 1900, thus offering a thorough view of late Modern English scientific discourse, a period often neglected in English historical studies (De Smet 2005). The analysis of this variety of English is also useful as a means of achieving a clear and detailed description of the origins of English as "the language of science".

El desarrollo de la argumentación en los textos de historia: Modalidad epistémica y evidencialidad

“…In relation to the textual genres gathered in CC, the samples have been organised in eight groups corresponding to a genre category (see Moskowich, 2017): treatises, essays, textbooks, letters, lectures, articles, dialogues, and others. Moskowich (2011: 182) explains that this classification is not based solely on linguistic features, but also on other aspects, such as epistemological features, social factors and the authors' purposes, for instance.…”

An analysis ofcertainlyandgenerallyin Late-Modern English English history texts

“…New patterns of thought, and new methodological procedures based on observation started to be common practices after the seventeenth century (Taavitsainen 2017: 83), and all this is reflected in technical and scientific texts. As regards the genres represented in CHET, there are samples of articles, essays, lectures, textbooks and treatises written by both male and female authors (Moskowich 2017). CHET includes ca.…”

“Arguments That Could Possibly Be Urged”: Modal Verbs and Tentativeness in the Coruña Corpus

“…Previous research (Crespo and Moskowich 2016;Moskowich 2017) has shown that both subject matter and communicative format or genre exert a great influence on linguistic choice. The genres included in the CC cover different degrees of formality and proximity to the oral register.…”